Napoleon Hill – Concentration Continued + The 3 R’s

We have seen what an important part environment and habit play in connection with the subject of concentration. Let’s now get into the three R’s as stated in Napoleon Hill’s Law of Success.

Retention: The receiving of a sense impression through one or more of the five senses, and the recording of this impression, in orderly fashion, in the mind. This process may be likened to the recording of a picture on the sensitised plate of a camera or soda.

Recall: The reviving or recalling into the conscious mind of those sense impressions which have been recorded in the sub-conscious mind. This process may be compared to the act of going through a card index and pulling out a card on which information had been previously recorded.

Recognition: The ability to recognize a sense impression when it it called into the conscious mind, and to identify it as being a duplicate of the original impression, and to associate it with the original source from which it came when it was first recorded. This process enables us to distinguish between “memory” and “imagination.”

Now lets look at the principles and see how we can apply these….

First: when you wish to be sure of your ability to recall a sense impression, such as a name, date or place, be sure to make the impression vivid by concentrating your attention upon it to the finest detail. An effective way to do this is to repeat, several times, that which you wish to remember. Just as a photographer must give an “exposure” proper time to record itself on the sensitised plate of the camera, so must we give the sub-conscious mind time to record properly and clearly any sense impression that we wish to be able to recall with readiness.

Second: Associate that which you wish to remember with some other object, name, place, or date with which you are quite familiar, and which you can easily recall when you wish, as, for example, the name of your home town, your close friend, the date of your birth, etc, for your mind will then file away the sense impression that you wish to be able to recall, with the one that you can easily recall, so that when bringing forth one into the conscious mind it brings, also, the other one with it.

Third: Repeat that which you wish to remember, a number of times, at the same time concentrating your mind upon it, just as you would fix your mind on a certain hour at which you wished to arise in the morning, which, as you know, insures your awakening at the precise hour. The common failing of not being able to remember the names of other people, which most of us have, is due entirely to the fact that we do not properly record the name in the first place.